Matthew Avery Sutton. American Apocalypse

In the past four decades, a number of the most astute students of American religion—Randall Balmer, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Joel Carpenter, Darren Dochuk, Timothy Gloege, Paul Harvey, George M. Marsden, and Grant Wacker, for example—have focused their attention on modern evangelicalism. Drawing on the work of those scholars and on years of diligent work with primary sources, Matthew Avery Sutton has crafted a dazzling new overview of evangelical history. Rather than attempting to shoehorn all of the stories that can be told about modern American evangelicalism into a single book, Sutton selects one of the possible stories—a story that centers on the connections between evangelicals’ political ideals and their attempts to make sense of Biblical prophecy—and presents it in a way that sheds fresh light on what evangelicalism has been in the past and what it is today. The story that Sutton highlights begins in the final decades of the nineteenth century (an era in which many American Protestants embraced an approach to interpreting prophecy developed by men such as John Nelson Darby and William E. Blackstone) and goes up to the present day. It is primarily, though not exclusively, a story about white male evangelicals whose ideas made their way into print: people such as Billy Graham, Carl F. H. Henry, Tim LaHaye, and Billy Sunday. Sutton is particularly interested in two overlapping groups of evangelical leaders. The first was made up of evangelicals who eschewed moderation and compromise: the sort of men who could be classified as fundamentalists or as “radical evangelicals.” The second was made up of people who enthusiastically promulgated the premillennial doctrines associated with Darby and Blackstone. Those doctrines were, Sutton suggests, the foundation on which modern evangelicalism was built. Evangelicals were absolutely certain that the second coming of Christ was imminent; that conviction “defined who they were, how they acted, and how they related to those around them” (xiv).

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